Black Lives Matter Activist Jumps Into Baltimore Mayoral Fray

DeRay Mckesson, whose activism over the last year and a half has vaulted him from obscure Twitter sage to a political force in the national Black Lives Matter movement, announced Wednesday that he was running for mayor of Baltimore.

His entry is a step into the mainstream for a national movement that has been criticized for a lack of organized structure and tactics. His candidacy is sure to jolt the political and protest communities at a time when activists have eschewed traditional politics and sought to work outside the system.

Mr. Mckesson, a Baltimore native who will run as a Democrat, faces an uphill climb.

He is diving, relatively late, into a crowded race of about a dozen candidates. Among them are prominent black leaders including Nick J. Mosby, a city councilman and the husband of the prosecutor who is trying six police officers in the death of a young black Baltimore man last year, and Sheila Dixon, the former mayor who remains popular even though she left office after a conviction on fraud charges. David L. Warnock, a prominent businessman, also is vying for the nomination.

The Democratic victor of the primary on April 26 is almost assured of winning the general election for an office that the party has controlled for nearly half a century.

In a statement, Mr. Mckesson said that he was running to challenge the normal order of governing in the city. “We cannot rely on traditional pathways to politics and the traditional politicians who walk that path,” he wrote. “We have to challenge the practices that have not and will not lead to transformation.”

Mr. Mckesson, 30, rose to prominence in the movement that emerged after a white police officer fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014. Mr. Mckesson was quickly on the ground in Missouri, providing sharp, continuous Twitter missives challenging what he and many others saw as a racist law enforcement regime.

At the center of the mayor’s race will be issues of race and policing in a predominantly black city that saw riots and mass demonstrations last year after 25-year-old Freddie Gray died of injuries sustained in police custody.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was criticized for her handling of the unrest that followed. She is not running for re-election.

Mr. Mckesson’s supporters herald him for helping shed light on national issues of police abuse and misconduct. His detractors, however, tag him as an antipolice anarchist whose comments helped foster spasms of protest violence in cities across the country where blacks have died at the hands of law enforcement. Mr. Mckesson also has critics in the movement, who argue that he is too cozy with the establishment (he has met with both Senator Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton as well as Valerie Jarrett, one of President Obama’s top advisers) and too much of a celebrity. (He is one of 10 people whom Beyoncé follows on Twitter.)

He left his job as an administrator in the Minneapolis Public Schools to move to the St. Louis area to work as a full-time activist. He then traveled around the country, turning to Twitter to chronicle protests against racial injustice. He has since returned to his hometown, Baltimore.

His decision to run may help pacify critics who have said that the Black Lives Matter movement is too diffuse and that the new crop of activists are ineffective in creating change. Older generations of civil rights activists have applauded the Black Lives Matter activists for bringing awareness to the issues facing blacks today. But they also ask: Now what?

“I was a civil rights activist, and we had specific goals, specific things that we wanted to see happen,” said Elbert Walton, 73, a political insider in St. Louis.

New activists jumping into the electoral fray would be a positive sign, Mr. Walton added, because it would mean “that they understood that their problem was a government problem” and that they had “to take control of government.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Activist Joins Campaign for Mayor in Baltimore. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe